John pulls no punches in his coverage of the Giants and his
support of Barry Bonds. A must read for all San Francisco fans.
~ David Pinto ~Baseball Musings

John is my blogfather. Internet years are like dog years and it is a testament to John's passion and love for the game that he's still rocking and rolling after all these years.
~ Alex Belth ~Sports Illustrated

It's hard to do anything for five years, let alone do it well.... Analyst, gadfly, passionate fan and talented writer.
~ Will Carroll ~Under the Knife

Jason Grimsley is the latest baseball player to find himself . By way of Baseball Musings, you can see the search warrant for Grimsley at the Smoking Gun. As David Pinto noted, the first tidbit that stands out is the fact that Grimsley avoided this (frankly absurd) public shaming by first cooperating with the investigators, and it was only after he hired a lawyer (and stopped cooperating) that he found his name in the papers.

A couple of things come to mind:

Grimsley obviously never watched NYPD Blue, a show which has gone a long way towards teaching people how to interact with the authorities; which is to say, never talk to the authorities without a lawyer present, guilty or innocent. Virtually everyone interviewed by Caruso or Franz will evetually tell them everything they want to know, unless there’s a lawyer there. I mean, come on. Not to mention the countless movies and TV shows that have also shown us that using the US Postal service to ship illegal substances is another big-time no-no.

Grimsley’s alleged admission of continued HGH use (since the banning of such substances) is also noteworthy, in that it furthers my argument that any professional athlete worth his salt will, in fact, use any possible means (legal or otherwise) to ply his craft at the highest level. Grimsley is an athlete on the edge of solid success, bouncing around as a reliever, one of the more fickle jobs in the big leagues. As such, he is the perfect candidate for PED use. The fact that he has continued to use them after the new policy suggests that the recent suspicions by Lupica and his pals (that players like Giambi and Bonds have continued to use PED’s) are perhaps more accurate than I suspected.

All in all, Grimsley”s problems demonstrate that the likelihood that we are at the forefront of the eradication of PED’s in professional sports is still extremely low. It will eventually prove to be impossible to monitor every single player, punitive measures will never dissuade the players at the edge of success, since the rewards will always be far greater than getting caught, (as the difference between being in the majors and not is so fantastically huge). In other words, just like in any career in the world, the rewards involved in cheating to win will always be there, and there will always be people who will take the risk. The right and the wrong of it are immaterial.

UPDATE: Wow. Now we find out that Barry’s old friend, IRS agent Jeff Novitzky is involved, (still on his Bonds vendetta, of course), and Albert Pujols, the man Lupica and the rest of these sanctimonious assholes want as their new superhero, has some how gotten his name dragged in, as his trainer (insert ironic smile) has been named in Grimsley’s alleged testimony.

Novitzky cannot possibly be doing this on his own, which means that his authority must be rather far upstream. Otherwise, I cannot imagine an IRS agent having the authority to get wire taps and pose as postal service workers in a federal drug sting operation, can you? So, under whose authority is he operating?

The NY Times is also running an editorial that mirrors my earlier comments about Grimlsey’s possible reasons for turning to PED’s.

All commentary is the opinion of John J Perricone unless otherwise noted.
None of the opinions expressed should be construed as being endorsed by theSan Francisco Giants,
Major League Baseball, or any other organization mentioned herein.